Category: technology

Having been an occasional user of Hugin for many years, I have described my recent experience of stitching High-dydnamic-range (HDR) and normal, (Low-dynamic-range) panoramas from a set of 9 images shot one evening at Salford Quays. The article should prove interesting and useful to anyone new to Hugin, or to those, like me, who use Hugin infrequently and never quite become “experts”.

As usual, Hugin did an excellent job of stitching, but I recommend outputting an HDR file in EXR format for tone-mapping in, for example, Luminance HDR.

After writing two articles on the Nature of Light and its relevance to digital photography, I found that the subject of noise still fascinated me and decided that I had to make some measurements. Looking at the wiggly waveforms of my previous article might indicate that camera A is noisier than camera B but can we measure the noise in a rigorous way? This present article explains how to do that using free software. As well as presenting graphs of the measurements I have attempted to explain the results from physical principles – and evidently the noise is predominantly photon noise (aka shot noise).

In the second of two articles I look at another natural phenomenon, photon noise (also known as Shot noise). As with diffraction blur, the problem becomes more serious as the physical size of the sensor is reduced.

Whilst this is not the only source of noise, it is now the dominant one in the darker areas of an image where only a relatively small number of photons are incident on the sensor. It is the counting of photons, which is subject to Poisson statistics, which produces the noise.